2005
Learning from the past ~ lessons for today
The Holocaust Memorial Day Committee in association with the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform; Dublin City Council; Dublin Maccabi Charitable Trust and the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland Holocaust MEMORIAL DAY
....Has the like of this happened in your days or in the days of your fathers? Tell your children about it and let your children tell theirs, and their children the next generation... Joel 2, ii-iii Holocaust MEMORIAL DAY
Holocaust MEMORIAL DAY
City Hall, Dublin ~ January 2005
Programme
• Introductory remarks, Yanky Fachler • Words of welcome, Lord Mayor of Dublin, Cllr Michael Conaghan • Address, the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern TD • The Stockholm Declaration, Michael McDowell TD, Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform • Holocaust Memorial Day, Oliver Donohoe, Chairperson, Holocaust Memorial Day committee • Musical interlude • The Shoah must never be trivialised (Simone Veil), read by Dr Garret FitzGerald • Sadism and humiliation (Eva Hoffman), read by John Bowman, Historian and Broadcaster • All of the victims (Elie Wiesel), read by Senator Mary O’Rourke • Nazi persecution of people with disabilities and disabling conditions, read by John Dolan, CEO, Disability Federation of Ireland • Nazi persecution of Gypsies, read by Anastasia Crickley, Chairperson, National Consultative Committee on Racism and Interculturalism • Nazi persecution of homosexuals, read by Senator David Norris • Nazi persecution of black people, read by Clement Esebamen, Eqalities Co-ordinator, Tallaght Partnership • Nazi persecution of political opponents, read by David Begg, General Secretary, Irish Congress of Trade Unions • First they came… (Martin Niemoeller), read by Theo Dorgan, Poet and Broadcaster • The Concentration Camps, read by Niall Toibin • Musical interlude • The rescuers, read by Sister Carmel Niland, member of the Council of Christians and Jews • The Old Man and the Conference, read by Paul Durcan • Liberation: readings by the ambassadors of the United States, Britain, Canada and the Russian Federation • Musical interlude • It could happen again (Yehuda Bauer), read by Ruairi Quinn TD • Go home from this place… (Paddy Fitzgibbon), read by Senator Mary Henry • Minute’s silence • CANDLE-LIGHTING CEREMONY • Prayer for the Repose of the Souls of the Departed, Rabbi Dr Yaakov Pearlman, Chief Rabbi of Ireland • El Malei Rachamin, Reverend Alwyn Shulman, Cantor of The Dublin Hebrew Congregation • Closing remarks, Yanky Fachler
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Holocaust Memorial Day
Mission Statement The Holocaust Memorial Day commemoration is designed to cherish the memory of all of the victims of the Nazi Holocaust. A candle-lighting ceremony is an integral part of the commemoration at which six candles are always lit for the six million Jews who perished, as well as candles for all of the other victims. The commemoration serves as a constant reminder of the dangers of racism and provides lessons from the past that are relevant today.
Summary of the Declaration of the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust
Issued in January 2000, on the 55th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1945 and endorsed by 44 countries, including Ireland.
We, the governments attending the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust, recognise that the Holocaust was a tragically defining episode of the 20th Century, a crisis for European civilisation and a universal catastrophe for humanity. In declaring that the Holocaust fundamentally challenged the foundations of civilisation, we share a commitment to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust, and to honour those who stood against it. The horrors that engulfed the Jewish People and other victims of the Nazis must forever be seared in our collective memory. With humanity still scarred by genocide, anti-semitism, ethnic cleansing, racism, xenophobia and other expressions of hatred and discrimination, we share a solemn responsibility to fight against these evils. Together with our European partners and the wider international community, we share a commitment to remember all the victims who perished, to respect the survivors still with us, and to reaffirm humanity's common aspiration for a democratic and tolerant society, free of the evils of prejudice and other forms of bigotry.
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Message from the Excerpts from the address by Lord Mayor of Dublin President McAleese at the Councillor Michael Conaghan Holocaust Memorial Day Commemoration in Dublin, January 2004
I am proud to continue the I am very grateful to have association of Dublin City been invited to this solemn with Holocaust Memorial commemoration and to join Day. I am sure that all with you in this act of future holders of this office remembrance as we call will wish to perpetuate forcefully to mind the this tradition in the city’s enormity of the Shoah, the annual calendar. barbaric human wasteland that was the Holocaust. In addition to commemorating the horrors of the Holocaust and paying tribute to all of the victims, the Sectarian hatred, racist hatred are awesome when they theme of Holocaust Memorial Day is to learn the run amok. The Holocaust told us that so emphatically lessons of the past and make them relevant today. when it confronted the world with ‘the crashing fires of Hell’ to use that phrase from the song of the Warsaw There can be no place in the City of Dublin, which has Ghetto sung in Auschwitz. enjoyed a long and positive relationship with the Jewish community, for the manifestations of anti-Semitism such I visited Majdanek in Poland last year. Today that as we witnessed in recent weeks. Racist behaviour of former Concentration Camp looks so innocuous, so this sort must serve as a timely wake-up call for silent and yet even after all these years it has an greater vigilance. overwhelming atmosphere of despair and anger, of disbelief and rage so powerful it robs you of speech I call on all members of Irish society to renew their and of any lingering complacency. commitment to embrace a more inclusive and more culturally diverse future together. On this third day of Sh’vat, we dedicate our time here today as a Yahrzeit for all those who suffered and died I would like to commend everyone involved in in the Holocaust and for all who survived but carried organising this Holocaust Memorial Day the memory through broken lives. In their name we call commemoration. on all peacemakers to do the work, to take the risks, to cross the divides to make our world a better place, a Cllr Michael Conaghan blessed place. Lord Mayor of Dublin May they bring peace upon us and upon all the earth.
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Europe – The number of Jews annihilated by the Nazis in each European country
The white figures on black relate to the approximate number of Jews that perished in each European country between September 1939 and May 1945. The total of just over 5,750,000 does not include thousands of infants murdered by the Nazis in late 1941, before their births could be recorded. Thousands of people from the remoter villages in Poland were added to the deportation trains which left larger localities, without any record of their existence or of their fate.
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The Nazi Holocaust – a systematic programme to exterminate the Jews of Europe
• The first concentration camp, Dachau, is established to hold the prisoners arrested after the arson attack on the Reichstag parliament building in February 1933.
• May 1933 – Nazi students and militiamen light huge public bonfires in which they burn books by Jews, communists and other ‘disruptive’ influences.
• 1933 onwards – Jews are expelled from the army, the civil service, professional associations, sports and social clubs.
• 1935 – The Nuremberg Laws strip Jews of citizenship and define them by racial criteria.
• 35,000 Jewish war veterans who had won medals for bravery during WWI lose their privileges.
• 9 November 1938 – Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass).
• 275,000 men, women and children with disabilities die in Nazi euthanasia programmes.
• 100,000 Jews die in labour camps between 1939 and 1940.
• Following the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, SS mobile murder squads known as Einsatzgruppen murder over 2,000,000 civilians, most of them Jews.
• Some 500,000 Jews die in ghettos from starvation and disease.
• 30,000 Jewish partisans fight the Nazis in Eastern Europe.
• More than 7,000 Jews are killed in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising between 19 April and 16 May, 1943.
• 1,000,000 Jews, 70,000 Christian Poles, 23,000 Gypsies, 15,000 Soviet prisoners and thousands of others die at Auschwitz.
• Of the 300,000 Jews who go into hiding, pretend to be Aryans or acquire false identity papers, 100,000 die after capture or betrayal.
• Out of 9,000,000 Jews living in Europe before 1939, only 3,000,000 remain after 1945.
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Hats, Ribbons and Refugees
The impoverished state of the west of Ireland in the At the opening of Les Modes Modernes in Galway,
1930s, prompted the Irish government to send a trade business was boosted when the Bishop of Galway delegation to Europe to explore the possibility of encouraged his lady parishioners to wear hats instead of attracting European industries to relocate to Ireland. The head-scarves to Mass. Serge was joined in Galway by his delegation succeeded in bringing two hat factories and wife Sophie and their daughter Rachel, but soon one ribbon factory to the region. afterwards, mother and daughter made the tragic mistake of returning to Paris for Sophie to be with her elderly mother and for Rachel to attend school there. Sophie was eventually arrested by the French police and sent, via Drancy, to the concentration camp where she perished. Rachel survived the war and was reunited with her father in Ireland. She currently lives in Canada.
Shortly after the establishment of Les Western Hats Board of Directors meeting 1940’s. Left to right: D.P. O’Dwyer, P Sarsfield Brady, Senator J.E. McEllin, James Modes Modernes, McEllin Murphy and F. Schmolka and Witztum were instrumental in bringing a Spear-headed by the then Minister for Trade, Sean second hat factory to the Lemass, the delegation including Senator John E west of Ireland. In 1938, McElinn and Marcus Witztum (a Polish-born Jewish Belgian designers began businessman who lived in Ireland), set off for France. work on the factory for They visited a small hat factory called Les Modes Western Hats in Castlebar, Modernes, owned by a French Jew, Henri Orbach. He Co Mayo. It opened for had invited his brother-in-law Serge Phillipson to leave business in 1940 under Mr Tom Ketterick, who worked in Berlin and work with him in France. Henri agreed to Western Hats in Castlebar from the watchful eye of Franz move his factory to Galway, and sent Serge to run the 1939, at his home in Ballina, Schmolka who originally business there in November 1937. Co. Mayo in 2003 came from Prague. Several Czech and Slovak Jewish families came to Ireland to work in Western Hats, causing the locals to designate the Blackfort area of Castlebar as ‘Little Jerusalem’. The factory was officially opened by Sean Lemass and blessed by the Bishop of Galway. During its lifetime, Western Hats employed hundreds of local people, and even had its own football team.
The third factory to move from Europe to Ireland was the Hirsch Ribbon Factory. Erskine Childers, then TD for Athlone- Longford, campaigned for the establishment of a factory in Longford. Emil Hirsch became the only Jew in Austria who managed to ship his entire factory out of the country after
The finished products at Western Hats the 1938 Anschluss (when Germany forcibly annexed Austria).
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In March 1939, the Irish When Robert Hirsch first arrived in Longford, he shared Minister for Finance signed lodgings with George Klaar (Clare), author of Last Waltz in a 30-year lease agreement Vienna, which tells the family story. George’s father, Ernst, with John McEllin and was dismissed from his job at the bank in Vienna because Marcus Witztum for the he was a Jew. He was put in contact with Emil Hirsch who disused Connolly Army arranged for Ernst to be included among the ‘experts’ who Barracks on Battery Road in would move to Ireland with the ribbon factory. Longford Town. While waiting in Berlin for his Irish visa, Ernst took up Emil Hirsch Emil became the managing work in a Paris bank. His wife, Stella, and son, George, director of Hirsch Ribbons, and his son Robert, was remained in Berlin to wait for their visas. Despite general manager. Ruby Burns, who spoke fluent German, inexplicable delays and prevarication, Stella and George translated for managers and staff and later became received their visas the morning after Kristallnacht in Robert’s wife. Their two children, Desmond and Jenny, also November 1938. worked in the factory and later in the Dublin sales office.
The establishment of these enterprises in Ireland which facilitated the move out of Europe for several Jewish families was achieved through the intercession of Marcus Witztum, Serge Phillipson, and other prominent businessmen. They used their excellent negotiating skills and provided the funds necessary to procure passports Connolly Army Barracks, Battery Road, Longford, that became the premises for Hirsch Ribbons and entry visas for the Jewish refugees. Stella and George reached Longford where they joined the Hirsch family. Although Ernst eventually received his Irish visa in Paris, he also made the fatal mistake of remaining in France instead of leaving immediately for Ireland. Stella missed her husband so much that she left the safety of Ireland to join him in Paris, arriving the day after war was declared. Ernst Klaar was arrested by the French police in August 1942 and deported to Auschwitz. Stella chose to accompany him, even though she had not been arrested – they both perished in the death camp.
The three factories provided a limited avenue of access to Ireland for Jewish families fleeing Nazi tyranny. Altogether, about thirty Jewish families came from Europe and settled in the West of Ireland. The factories turned areas of unemployment, emigration and desolation into regions of employment and prosperity. Generations of local men and women found good employment in the ribbon and hat factories and remember with fondness the people they Permit for Robert Hirsch granted by Dept. Industry & Commerce, 1935 worked for and their times working with them. page 7 Holocaust MEMORIAL DAY
The Hat Factory
…Myself, I am thinking of the local hat factory, And the funereal mortarboards of airborn puritans Of its history and the eerie fact And the megalithic coifs of the pancake women of Brittany That in my small town I have never known And the sleek fedoras of well-to-do thugs Anyone who worked in it And sadistic squires’ Napoleonic tricorns Or had to do with it at all; And prancing horse-cavalry in their cruel shakos As a child I used to look through a hole in the hedge And the heroic lifeboatman’s black sou’wester At the hat factory down below in the valley; And the nicotine-stained wig of the curly-haired barrister I used to lie flat on my face in the long grass And the black busby used as a handbag by my laughing And put out my head through the hole: brother Had the hatters looked out through their porthole And the silken turban of the highbrow widow windows And foreign legionaires in nullah kepis They would have seen high up in the hillside And May Day presidiums in astrakhans A long wild hedgerow broken only And bonnets and boaters and sombreros and stetsons By the head of the child looking out through the hole; And stove-pipes and steeples and mantillas and berets I speculate; And topis and sunhats and deerstalkers and pill-boxes And as to what kind of hats they make; And naughty grandmothers in toques And do they have a range in black birettas; And bishops’ mitres and soldiers’ helmets; And do they have a conveyor belt of toppers; And in Languedoc and in Aran – cloth caps. And do the workers get free hats? And what if you were a hatter And I recall the Pope’s skull-cap And you married a hatter Placed on my head when as a boy-child And all your sons and daughters worked as hatters In a city hospital I lay near to death And you inhabited a hat-house all full of hats; And the black homburg of the red-nosed undertaker Hats, hats, hats, hats. And the balaclavas of assassins Hats: the apotheosis of an ancient craft; And the pixies of the lost children of the murdered earth And I think of all the nationalities of Israel And the multicoloured yamulka of the wandering Jew And of how each always clings to his native hat, And the black kippa of my American friend His priceless and moveable roof, In Jerusalem in the snow His hat which is the last and first symbol And the portly Egyptian’s tiny fez Of a man’s slender foothold on this earth… And the tragic Bedouin’s kefia in the sands of sun And the monk’s cowl and the nun’s wimple From: The Hat Factory in A Snail in my Prime, by Paul Durcan
Kristallnacht
In November 1938, Herschel Grynspan, a Jewish student in Paris, assassinated the third secretary in the German Embassy. In retaliation, the Nazis launched Kristallnacht – The Night of Broken Glass – on 9 November 1938. As this pogrom raged throughout Germany, over 100 Jews were murdered, synagogues, Jewish homes, schools and businesses were burnt to the ground.
In responce to Kristallnacht, Jewish and gentile leaders in Britain persuaded the government to allow some 10,000 children from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia to find shelter and refuge in Britain. This programme was known as the Kindertransports.
Kristallnacht Tisa von der Schulenburg page 8 Holocaust MEMORIAL DAY
Forgotten Victims of the Holocaust
Gypsy Victims of the Nazis The Nazi Holocaust of the Gypsies is known in the Romany language as the Pharrajimos - ‘the devouring’. No exact figures are available, but an estimated 500,000 Gypsies were gassed, starved or used as human guinea- pigs. At least another half million were displaced and dispossessed, their identity documents destroyed.
There was a long tradition of persecution of Hungarian Roma. In 1916, a decree mandated that all 'wandering' Gypsies were to be registered publicly and physically marked. Many were placed in state work camps, and Gypsy children, victims of medical experiments. Auschwitz from 1928, official national Gypsy raids took place at least twice a year. In 1934 Laszlo Endre demanded that communities to Transnistria where officials condemned wandering Gypsies were put into concentration camps. them to death by starvation. After the war, thousands of Gypsies remained in Transnistria, Baragan and other
In order to secure the future of the Aryan race, German Displaced Persons' camps. Their situation was Gypsy men were sterilised en masse. After the enactment compounded by the fact that they were unable to provide of Germany's racial laws in September 1935, and the formal proof of their identities, nationalities or ancestry. establishment of the Racial Hygiene Research Institute in November 1936, ‘racially inferior’ Roma and Sinti were In 2003, the Jewish community in Prague hosted the first- continuously deported. From March 1939 the Gypsies had ever conference on the genocide of the Roma during the to wear differentiating insignia. Roma and Sinti were held Second World War. A further step towards recognising the in Gypsy detainment camps before being sent to plight of Europe's Gypsies was taken in August 2004 concentration camps. when a wreath-laying ceremony was held on the site of the Gypsy camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. 60 years after the gassing of the final 2,900 Gypsies, several hundred mourners, including camp survivors, walked from the barracks area to the ruins of a gas chamber, where Gypsy representatives lit candles.
The arrival of Gypsy prisoners in Auschwitz USHMM
After the Anschluss, Austrian Roma were also rounded up, and were taken to the Lodz ghetto in Poland. In 1943, they were sent from there to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Gypsy concentration camp. Mass slaughters of Gypsies took place elsewhere. The Ustasha killed Gypsies in the Roma leaders at wreath-laying in Auschwitz Jasenovac camp in Croatia, and the Romanians sent Roma Czarek Sokolowski / AP The Irish Times 3 August 2004
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Nazi Persecution of People with Disabilities In the early decades of the twentieth century the study of Eugenics was popular and considered a serious science. Practitioners in Europe and America advocated the elimination of ‘weaker strains’ in order to promote a healthy and strong human race. While other nations abandoned the practice of Eugenics, the Nazis used it as an ideological justification for medical practitioners to eliminate ‘unfit’ members of society. The Nazis adopted the concept of ‘weaker strains’ to annihilate Jews, blacks, homosexuals, Gypsies, people with “You are sharing the load! A hereditarily ill person costs disabilities and disabling conditions, and others they 50,000 reichsmarks on average up to the age of sixty,” considered non-Aryan. reproduced in a biology textbook by Jakob Graf USHMM Under the Nazis, there was compulsory registration of all One of the first and most extreme measures was The ‘malformed’ newborn children. Hundreds of Nazi doctors Euthanasia Programme which provided the prototype for and nurses betrayed their professional ethics by broader genocidal actions. It is estimated that the Nazis participating in the euthanasia programmes. In one medical murdered 275,000 people with physical and intellectual centre, psychiatrists, nurses and secretaries held a party to disabilities, on the grounds that these people were a celebrate the cremation of its ten-thousandth victim. ‘burden on the state’. High school textbooks contained examples of maths problems calculating the costs of care The adult euthanasia programme was halted due to for the disabled compared to the costs of caring for a negative publicity in 1941 but the killing continued on a healthy person. smaller scale. The gassing technology and knowhow that had proved so successful in T-4 were transferred to the Under Hitler's orders, the T4 Advanced Euthanasia extermination camps as part of The Final Solution. Programme was established. When the physicians at T4 decided that the Polish victims of the Nazis methods used to kill The Nazi ideology viewed men, women and children of the children in the initial Polish derivation and language as subhumans who programmes were not occupied lands vital to Germany. As part of the policy to efficient enough for the destroy any future Polish resistance, Hitler decreed that all mass killing of adults, members of the Polish intelligentsia were to be killed. Tens they experimented with of thousands of political leaders, church leaders, various gases and intellectuals, professionals, entrepreneurs, landowners and delivery systems. At first other Polish elites were targeted. They were either they used gas vans and murdered or sent to concentration camps. It is estimated eventually came up with that 3,000 priests were murdered between 1939 and 1945. the idea of disguising As part of wider efforts to suppress Polish culture, the A mentally disabled girl gas chambers as Nazis destroyed universities, schools, museums, libraries photographed shortly before showers in order not to and scientific laboratories. They made sure that Polish her murder USHMM cause panic. children did not progress beyond elementary school.
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Black Victims of the Nazis Political Opponents of the Nazis Fifty years before the Holocaust, Germans were carrying out The Nazis persecuted hundreds of thousands of political medical experiments on black people. Between 1894 and dissidents and opponents - some for what they did, 1904, German settlers in the colony of South West Africa some for what they refused to do, and some for what systematically lynched members of the Herero tribe, raped they were. In the early 1920’s, the Nazis began disrupting their women and stole their land and cattle. When the meetings of Liberal Democrats, Socialists, Communists, Herero rebelled, most of the tribe was wiped out by the and Trade Unionists. The torching of the Reichstag German army. national parliament building in 1933 gave the Nazis a pretext for suppressing the Communist Party, and later the Social Democratic Party, with brutal violence.
Images used for lectures on genetics, ethnology, and race breeding USHMM
The German geneticist, Eugen Fischer, was allowed to perform medical experiments on the Herero captives. He published his scientific race theories in a book called The Principles of Human Heredity and Race Hygiene. These theories impressed and influenced Hitler. In order to keep intact the purity of the Aryan population, the Nazis established Commission Number 3 to secretly organise Political opponents being arrested. Berlin, Germany, 1933 the forced sterilisation of hundreds of children with African ancestry. The Nazis abolished trade unions and co-operatives, confiscated their assets, and prohibited strikes. Political Fischer went on to become chancellor of the University of dissidents and political opponents were among the first Berlin, where he taught to be arrested. In 1933, the Nazis established the first medicine to a concentration camp, Dachau, as a detention centre for generation of Nazi political prisoners arrested after the Reichstag fire. physicians, including Josef Mengele. The One of the most vocal political opponents of the Nazis medical experiments was Lutheran pastor, Martin Niemoeller. Although before begun on the Hereros the War he held conventional anti-Semitic views, his anti- in 1904 were the Nazi activities led to him spending 12 years in blueprint for Mengele's concentration camps. After the War, it was Niemoeller notorious genetic who persuaded the German Protestant Churches to Slide of mulatto child used in experiments in lectures on genetics and race at formally accept guilt for their complicity in the suffering Auschwitz 35 years the State Academy for Race and of Jews and political dissidents during Hitler’s tyranny. later. Health in Dresden USHMM
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Homosexual Victims of the Nazis The Nazis regarded homosexuality as a political crime. They said it was a sickness linked to a Jewish plot to weaken Aryan men. In 1935, local police departments were required to submit to the Gestapo lists of suspected homosexuals. Paragraph 175 of the Legal Code was amended to criminalise homosexuality. In 1942, Himmler Mug shot of homosexual Auschwitz prisoner Alfred Fischer and the Reich Ministry of Justice announced the death USHMM penalty for homosexuals.
Discrimination against homosexuals continued after the The Nazis arrested 100,000 gay men, of whom 50,000 war. Homosexual concentration camp survivors were not were sent to prison or concentration camps. Homosexuals acknowledged as victims of Nazi persecution. Some even were forced to wear pink triangles on their prison had to serve out their terms of imprisonment because the uniforms, and lesbians were forced to wear black Nazi anti-homosexual laws remained on the West German triangles. In Auschwitz, Dachau, Gross-Rosen, Mauthausen statute books until 1969. The criminalisation and social and Ravensbrück, homosexuals were placed under triple stigmatisation of homosexuals in Europe and the United camp discipline: they were subjected to harder work, less States in the years after the Holocaust, made most food, and stricter supervision than the other inmates. homosexual survivors afraid to tell their stories.
Nazi Persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses Jehovah’s Witnesses had a history of persecution in Germany, and after the Nazis came to power, this persecution intensified. In July 1933, the Gestapo closed the printing operation of the Witnesses’ Watchtower Society, and ordered all state-police precincts to search regional Witness groups and organisations.
The Witnesses defied Nazi prohibitions by continuing to meet and distribute literature smuggled in from Switzerland. As a consequence, many Witnesses were arrested and sent to prison and concentration camps. Although Jehovah’s Witnesses were banned by law in April 1935, they refused to be drafted into the military services or to perform war-related work. The children of Witnesses Solidarity, by Richard Grune, lithograph 1947 were ridiculed by their teachers because they refused to Schwules Museum, Berlin. give the ‘Heil Hitler’ salute. Many homosexuals were subjected to medical
experiments. At Buchenwald, SS physician, Dr. Carl Many Witnesses were tortured by the Gestapo to Vaernet, performed castrations and surgical operations renounce their faith – few did so. It is estimated that half designed to ‘convert men to heterosexuals’. In their quest of the 10,000 Witnesses imprisoned in Nazi concentration to create an Aryan Master Race, the Nazis put hundreds camps perished. of homosexuals to death.
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Badges of Hate
The yellow Star of Jews who were in David imprinted with concentration camps the word ‘Juif’ – the often wore yellow French word for triangles like this ‘Jew’ – is typical of one marked with a the badges the ‘U’ indicating that Nazis forced Jews the prisoner who to wear. wore it was from Hungary.
Jews also wore Star of David armbands. This patch identified a Polish person Jehovah’s living under Witnesses, whose Nazi control. religion prevented them from swearing an oath of loyalty to Hitler, had to wear purple triangles. Black triangles were worn by those classified as ‘antisocial’ including Pink triangles were Gypsies, lesbians for homosexuals and and prostitutes. those accused of homosexual acts.
Criminals wore green triangles.
Political prisoners wore red triangles. This armband was worn by a labour camp prisoner.
Markings used by the Nazis to identify their victims USHMM
First they came for the Communists But I was not a Communist, so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Socialists and Trade Unionists But I was not a Socialist or Trade Unionist, so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Jews But I was not a Jew, so I did not speak out. Then they came for me But by then there was no one left to speak out for me.
Martin Niemoeller page 13 Holocaust MEMORIAL DAY
The Plight of the Struma
In December 1941, a group of 769 Jewish men, women, children and babies left the Romanian port of Constanza aboard a rickety 6m x 16m Danube barge called the Struma, built in 1830. The passengers were headed for Istanbul in neutral Turkey, where they hoped to be given permission to make their way by land to Palestine. Instead of the scheduled 14 hours, the unsteady vessel took four days to reach the
Bosphorus, off the coast of Turkey. The only photograph that exists of the Struma
On 24 February 1942, in order to rid itself of this embarrassing problem, Turkey decided to tow the floating death-trap beyond its territorial waters into the Black Sea, despite warnings from the Jewish community that a sea journey could only end in disaster. Ticket for the Struma
For one day, the Struma remained stranded, paralysed, The engine gave out, the boat was without fuel, food and drifting precariously with no provisions or fuel. On or water, and although a Turkish tugboat towed the 25 February, an explosion ripped the Struma apart. To Struma into Istanbul Harbour, the Turkish authorities this day, the cause of the blast is unknown. What is were concerned about jeopardising their neutrality. known is that the Struma sank within minutes. The Bowing to intense pressure from the British Mandatory crew and over 760 refugees perished. Only one authorities, Turkey denied assistance to the ship and passenger, David Stoliar, survived. its passengers, and the Struma was left quarantined in the harbour.
Only 9 passengers were allowed to disembark on medical grounds or because they held valid entry visas for Palestine. No one else left the crippled boat, where the hundreds of passengers were imprisoned in narrow, unventilated confines, taking turns to climb up for a breath of fresh air. There was not enough sleeping space for all, no infirmary, no galley, no bathing facilities, and just one single makeshift toilet. Some food was smuggled aboard by local Jews who had bribed officials. Entry Visa of survivor David Stoliar After 8 weeks in Istanbul Harbour, Britain belatedly relented and announced that they would allow children aged 11 to 16 to enter Palestine. But it was too late.
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Park Bench ‘not for Jews’ Hulton archive, reproduced in The Irish Times, 19 April 2003
The Riegner Cable – First documentary evidence of The Final Solution to reach the West
Telegram sent by Samuel Silverman MP to American Jewish leader, Rabbi Stephen Wise, revealing the contents of a message received from Dr Gerhart Riegner, the World Jewish Congress representative in Switzerland on 8 August 1942. This was the first documentary evidence to reach the West of the Nazi plan to murder the Jews, known as The Final Solution.
A note left by Shmuel Zygielboym addressed to Allied political leaders, following their failure to aid the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto, 12 May 1943
"...By my death I wish to make my final protest shall contribute to breaking down the indifference of against the passivity with which the world is looking those who may now, at the last moment, rescue a few on and permitting the extermination of the Jewish Polish Jews who are still alive...I bid farewell to people. I know how little human life is worth today, everybody and to everything that was dear to me and but as I was unable to do anything during my life, I that I have loved."
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Illustration of Crematorium ll with chimney by Alfred Kantor
Gas chamber at Majdanek Crematoria lll in Birkenau
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It is almost impossible to grasp the magnitude, the scale and the horror of the Nazi programme of extermination. Nazi death camps and concentration camps were established in: Germany, Poland, Russia, France, Holland, Belgium, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Italy, Morocco, Algeria, Austria, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and Norway.
Auschwitz Slavonska-Pozega Schmolz Berg Birkenau Gradiska Börgermoor Bredtvet Majdanek Jadovno Schokken Missour Sobibor Jasenovac Wieliczka Tendrara Stutthof Stara-Gradiska Lwow Amersfoort Treblinka Danica Mielec Ommen Bergen-Belsen Dakovo Pawiak Vught Buchenwald Gornja reka Plaszow Bolzano Dachau Jastrebarsko Zabiwoko Fossoli Janowska Tasmajdan Le Vernet Krapje Ravensbruck Zemun Natzweiler-Struthof Sered Sachsenhausen Lepoglava Noé Brocice Mauthausen Loborgrad Récébédou Chabatz Drancy Sajmite Zakopane Kragujevac Theresienstadt Klooga Vivara Yanowski Breendonck Sisak Kangasjarvi Vertugen Westerbork Neuengamme Koveri Banjica Krakow Papenburg Argeles Kruscica Lemberg Dieburg Aurigny Risiera di San Sabba Mezjapark Esterwegen Brens Czwartaki Ponary Belzec Gurs Daugavpils Rawa-Russkaja Biesiadka Les Milles Balanowka Salapils Dzierzazna Rieucros Palemonas Riga-Kaiserwald Litzmannstadt Rivesaltes Domanievka Dundaga Gross-Rosen Suresnes Tromsdalen Eleje-Meitenes Sachsenburg Thill Ulven Jungfernhof Huta-Komarowska Abadla Akmétchetka Lenta Kulmhof-Chelmno Ain el Ourak Bisjumujsje Spilwe Lublin Bechar Edineti Kaunas Poniatowa Berguent Kielbasin Aleksotaskowno Bierznow Bogari Pravieniskès Strazdumujsje Pustkow Bouarfa Volary Flossenburg Radogosz Djelfa Baerum Gundelsheim Khorol Kenadsa Falstadt Slano Radom Meridja Bogdanovka
Partial list of Nazi concentration camps and extermination camps page 17 Holocaust MEMORIAL DAY
The Burial – A Personal Memory
The plans for the elimination of Slovak Jewry began late in coats enter the shop. It is the Gestapo. This is the state 1941 and in March 1942 the arrest and deportation of Jews police with the responsibility for arresting Jews and became a reality. When the deportation of Slovak Jewry members of the resistance. They are checking identity started for the first time, my grandmother was smuggled papers. My grandmother is dressed like a peasant. She to Hungary where it was still safe for Jews. The pre-war has false papers. It doesn't take long for them to population of Slovak Jewry was approximately 90,000. By discover this. They work with ruthless efficiency. It is late Sept 1942, only 25,000 were left and in hiding. Altogether October 1944. They physically pressurised her and forced 15,000 survived the war. At this time, partly by the her to disclose our plans and the addresses of some of intervention of the Catholic Church and bribery by the our family members. When my mother entered the shop Jewish leadership of high-ranking government officials, the she was apprehended too. By the evening, 13 of us - deportation of Jews was suspended. including aunts and uncles - were caught and brought to the Gestapo headquarters in Bratislava. Out of the 13, In the year 1944, everything changed. Germany occupied only 5 of us survived: my mother Judith, my brother Miki, Hungary and then the persecution of Hungarian Jews my aunt Margo, my cousin Eva and myself. No false started. It was necessary to smuggle my grandmother papers or effort helped. When finally the deportation of back to Slovakia. Also, Slovak Jewry was under threat. We Slovak Jews stopped, just 5,000 were left in hiding. decided to leave our village because it was too dangerous to stay, as everybody knew us. The plan was At the beginning of November 1944, we were deported to to move to another village and, with false papers, to Bergen Belsen. My grandmother was already 76 years pretend that we were Catholics. I attended private old. It was Winter. We were travelling for seven days in lessons with a priest who was sympathetic to our plight, cattle carriages. Many did not survive the trip. It was to learn how to pray in church, cross myself etc. As very difficult for my grandmother. On our arrival it was children we would be most exposed to the public. raining and cold. We had to walk for hours to our new home. The fear was constant that my grandmother would My grandmother was waiting for us, so was the Gestapo. not survive the ordeal; she was not a well person. After settling down every day, I would sit beside her when she My grandmother, Rosaleen, is waiting for us in a shop in took out a box of medication, pills and powders that the centre of Bratislava. Two tall men in long leather kept her alive. I would go out with her for small walks and she would tell me stories. It was very cold and the time was very difficult for all of us.
It was usual that every family had one pre-packed case with some provisions of food, sweets etc. as we were not given time to pack when the state police knocked on the door. My grandmother was responsible for this case. Every day we, the children, sat around her and she would give us some goodies. She stretched it for several weeks, but finally everything was gone.
Sadly, the medication also ran out and my grandmother Tomi’s grandmother, Rosaleen, the day she was arrested by the Gestapo finally fell ill and one night in March 1945, she passed away.
page 18 Holocaust MEMORIAL DAY
USHMM I remember waking up, seeing my mother and my aunt On the morning when my grandmother died, these two Margo quietly sitting beside the bed. There were no more women came to our room. We just sat in silence. One tears. She had to be buried. The procedure was brutal. grabbed the hands and the other the feet and they threw her onto the trolley over several bodies that had been In Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, people were dying collected from other blocks. It was very painful to watch mainly due to starvation and disease. Towards the end of but nobody uttered a word. We sat for ages taking in the war, the amount of people dying was so vast that there what had happened. was nobody to take the bodies away. The bodies were piling up. At the end of the war, there were thousands of Later I went out to see where she was buried. bodies piled up just across from our barracks. Unfortunately there was no grave. She was buried under a pile of dead bodies. Every morning, two women came with a two-wheel carriage and enquired if anybody died over night. It was a daily Tomi Reichental, who now lives in Dublin, routine and most times they took several bodies away. was 9 years of age when he was in Bergen-Belsen in 1945.
Sadism and humiliation: Those were the distinctive horror marks of the Holocaust. The extravaganzas of cruelty that characterised Nazi behaviour towards Jews; the bouts of brutal mockery and loutish laughter that accompanied the free-for-all massacres in Eastern European villages – those as much as the phantasmagoric statistics of death, gave the Nazi project of annihilation its uniquely grotesque character. The possibility of such behaviour leaves a contaminating stain on all our perceptions, on our very idea of human nature. Eva Hoffman
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Janusz Korczak The Butterfly
Henryk Goldszmit, better known to the world by his pen- The last, the very last, name Janusz Korczak, was born in Warsaw in 1878. He So richly, brightly, dazzlingly yellow. wanted to become a writer, but his family prevailed upon Perhaps if the sun’s tears would sing him to follow a more practical career, and he became one of against a white stone…. the few Jews to study medicine at the University of Warsaw. He graduated in 1905 and served in field hospitals in the Such, such a yellow Ukraine and Manchuria during the Russo-Japanese War. Is carried lightly ‘way up high’. It went away I’m sure because it wished to go kiss the world good-bye.
For seven weeks I’ve lived in here, Penned up inside this ghetto. But I have found what I love here. The dandelions call to me And the white chestnut branches in the court. Only I never saw another butterfly.
That butterfly was the last one. Butterflies don’t live in here, Monument to Janusz Korczak, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, Israel in the ghetto. He started writing as a medical student, using the pseudonym Janusz Korczak. For the next four decades he led a double life. Pavel Friedmann, aged 17, June 1942, Theresienstadt He was Dr. Henryk Goldszmit, the paediatrician and child psychologist; and he was Janusz Korczak, the author of popular children's books and champion of children's rights. In 1911 he opened an orphanage for Jewish children, followed nine years later by an orphanage for Catholics. He edited the weekend supplement of a popular newspaper, Maly Przeglad, which was entirely written and edited by children. Korczak also had his own weekly radio programme, for which he used the name Old Doctor. No one knew that a Jewish educator was shaping the minds of Polish children.
When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, Korzcak This poem was found amongst a cache of children’s artwork accompanied his 200 Jewish orphans into the Warsaw at the end of the war that had been hidden by the artist Ghetto. Powerful friends from the outside arranged for him Friedl Dicker-Brandeis who was a prisoner in Theresienstadt. to escape, but he chose to remain with his children. On 6 It was subsequently deposited in the Jewish Museum, Prague. August 1942, the Nazis ordered the liquidation of all orphanages. Korczak lined his children up in orderly rows, Pavel was eventually deported from Theresienstadt to and led them singing as they walked for two miles to the Auschwitz, where he died on 29 September 1944. collection site. As they climbed the 70 steps over the ghetto bridge, they were jeered by Polish onlookers. Korczak and the children were sent to Treblinka, where they all perished.
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Escape from Auschwitz
Although Auschwitz was one of the most closely guarded Two other escapees, Czeslav secrets of The Final Solution, five Jewish inmates Mordowicz and Arnost Rosin, succeeded in escaping from that notorius extermination who reached Slovakia on 6 camp: Siegfried Lederer, Rudolf Vrba, Alfred Wetzler, June, confirmed what Vrba and Czeslav Mordowitz and Arnost Rosin. Wetzler had described, adding that the Auschwitz crematoria On 5 April 1944, Siegfried Lederer escaped from Auschwitz had started to consume dressed in an SS uniform. Afterwards he sneaked into the Hungarian Jews at an Theresienstadt ghetto in order to warn the Jews about unprecedented pace, and could what awaited them in Auschwitz. The leaders of the Jewish hardly cope with the task. Rudolf Vrba Council decided that it was better for the potential victims to remain ignorant of their impending fate. The Vrba-Wetzler report became known as The Auschwitz Report. It was the first document by Auschwitz inmates to Two days after Lederer escaped, two Slovak Jews, Rudolf reach the free world and its accuracy and authenticity Vrba and Alfred Wetzler also broke out of Auschwitz. They dispelled any doubts that had existed until then. Between had learned from a kapo that preparations were in hand May and June 1944, more than 437,000 Hungarian Jews had for constructing another railway line to Auschwitz. This perished in the death camps. When the report was would streamline the killing process by transporting the published in the Swiss and then the Western press, it newly arrived Hungarian Jews directly to the gas chambers. confirmed the reality of the Nazi extermination programmes. Vrba had been planning his escape for more than two The Auschwitz Report was drawn to the attention of years, but now it was urgent: “It was no longer a question Winston Churchill, Franklin D Roosevelt and Pope Pius Xll of reporting a crime, but of preventing one.” who reacted by bringing pressure on Miklos Horthy. 170,000 Jews still remained in Budapest when the order Between 7 and 10 April, the 20-year-old Vrba and the 26- came to halt the deportations. The cessation of the year-old Wetzler hid in a hideout that had been sprinkled deportations even at this late stage, meant that the two with gasoline-soaked tobacco to prevent the dogs from escapees from Auschwitz had managed to save 170,000 sniffing them out. They then broke through the outer lives. perimeter of Birkenau and walked over a hundred miles for 11 days to their native Slovakia. On 24 April they established contact with Leo Baek. He and other members of the Working Group were the first Jewish leaders to hear a first-hand report about Auschwitz. Vrba had brought with him a label off a Zyklon B gas canister.
Vrba and Wetzler were interviewed in two separate rooms for 3 days, and produced a detailed plan of Auschwitz- Birkenau, its methods of mass murder, and the events they had witnessed. They begged the Slovak Jewish Council to warn Hungarian Jewry about the expansion of the extermination facilities at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Vrba’s escape route
page 21 Holocaust MEMORIAL DAY
Liberation and Survival
Despite the brutal nature of Stalin's regime before, during and after the Second World War, the defeat of Nazism would have taken much longer without the Red Army's invasion of German-held territory from the East. The D-Day allied invasion of Normandy took place in June 1944. The same month, Marshal Zhukov's main assault started on the German front lines, with 4,000 tanks and more than one and a half million soldiers fighting on a 500-mile long front. By the end of the summer of 1944 the Red Army had reached the gates of Warsaw and the road to Berlin had been opened.
Russian soldier in Auschwitz Yad Vashem Archives
concentration camps. Between April and May 1945 the Americans liberated Buchenwald, Dachau, Dora/Mittelbau, Flossenbürg and Mauthausen; the British liberated Bergen-Belsen and Neuengamme; the Canadians liberated Westerbork.
Tanks roll into Theresienstadt Yad Vashem Archives After the liberation of Auschwitz, the Red Army went on to liberate the extermination camps at Plaszow, Gross- On 27 January, 1945, Red Army troops - including many Rosen, Majdanek, Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen, Sered, Jewish soldiers - liberated the Auschwitz-Birkenau death Sobibor, Stutthof and Theresienstadt. camp. It is this date that was chosen by the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust as the date for annual Holocaust Memorial Day commemorations. When the Soviet liberators entered the gates of Auschwitz, they found only about 7,000 emaciated prisoners alive. These survivors had been too frail to leave when the Nazis had forced the majority of Auschwitz prisoners on death marches. The Soviet soldiers also found 836,525 items of women’s clothing, 348,820 items of men’s clothing, 43,525 pairs of shoes, and seven tons of human hair.
Over the course of the last months of the war in Europe, Allied troops liberated Nazi death camps and
US soldiers in Buchenwald Yad Vashem Archives
page 22 Holocaust MEMORIAL DAY
Bergen-Belsen shortly after liberation Yad Vashem Archives
In this kingdom of darkness there were many people. People who came from all the occupied lands of Europe. And then there were the Gypsies and the Poles and the Czechs...it is true that not all the victims were Jews. But all the Jews were victims. Elie Wiesel
Liberation of Auschwitz Yad Vashem Archives
page 23 Holocaust MEMORIAL DAY
Beyond the Call of Duty
RAOUL WALLENBERG was a ARISTIDES de SOUSA MENDES Swedish diplomat and banker was the Portugese consul- who travelled to Budapest in general in Bordeaux, France in 1944 at the request of the War 1940. He stamped thousands of Refugee Board and Hungarian Jewish passports with Jewish organisations. By the Portuguese transit visas time he arrived, almost half a enabling them to flee. Even million Jews had already been when he was ordered home for deported to Auschwitz. He immediately set about issuing insubordination and eventual dismissal, he stopped at Swedish certificates of protection which were granted to the Portuguese consulate in Bayonne, and issued Jews with any sort of Swedish link. As the political hundreds more visas to fleeing Jewish refugees. situation changed in Hungary, Wallenberg found refuge for 33,000 Jews in houses flying the flags of neutral SUGIHARA SEMPO, was the countries. In November 1944, he accompanied Jews on a Japanese consul to Kovno, forced march to the Austrian border, distributing food, Lithuania in 1940. He blatantly clothing and medicine. When the Red Army liberated ignored Japanese Foreign Ministry Hungary, Wallenberg was taken as a prisoner to the instructions by issuing transit USSR, where his fate remains an unsolved mystery to visas to about 6,000 Jewish this day. The Soviets always maintained that he died in refugees from Poland and prison. In 1991 the Russians handed his death certificate Lithuania. The visas allowed the to the Swedish authorities. Jews to travel on the Trans-Siberian railway to Vladivostok, where they sailed to Japan. Their ultimate destination was PAUL GRUENINGER was the Curacao, a Dutch colony in the Caribbean that did not police commander of the Swiss require entry visas. Between 1939 and 1941, several canton of St. Gallen when thousand Jewish refugees passed through Kobe, including neutral Switzerland, under the three hundred teachers and students from Poland’s Mir pressure from Germany, closed Yeshiva, the only talmudical college on the European its borders to Jewish refugees mainland to fully survive the Holocaust. By the time the in 1938. Disregarding orders, Pacific War broke out after Pearl Harbour in December 1941, Grueninger provided thousands most of the Jewish refugees had been allowed to settle in of Jewish refugees with falsely dated papers, indicating Hongkew, the Japanese-controlled section of Shanghai. that they had entered Switzerland before the borders were closed. The Holocaust was one of the greatest outrages against humanity in all recorded history. It was so SELAHATTIN ULKUMEN was the bad that people living in the comparative sanity of Turkish consul-general on the this country should hardly be blamed for not German-occupied Greek island anticipating the lunacy of Hitler, or his henchmen. But of Rhodes in 1944. Ulkumen the fact still remains that we sat by in mute indifference while the greatest outrage of modern managed to save more than 50 times was being perpetrated, and we should learn Jews by bending the rules in from our mistakes. order to accredit them with Archbishop of Armagh, Sean Brady Turkish citizenship. St Patrick’s Day, 2004 page 24 Holocaust MEMORIAL DAY
The Rescuers
For many of those who put their lives at risk to help Jews during the Holocaust, this was a moral duty that they did not question at the time.
“How can you call us good? “No law in the world says We did what had to be done.” that I should live and you die. Pastor André and Magda Trocmé were French Protestants The Nazis have decided that, (Huguenots) from Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, the town that but I am fighting against them collectively defied Vichy and Germany to shelter thousands and am not bound by their rules.” of Jewish refugees before they escaped to neutral Spain or Switzerland. Stanislawa Ogrodzinska, Poland.
“I had many Jewish friends “The way it started was, my before the war, wife's girlfriend, her name is and we were all very close. Henny, came to us. She was During the war I was poor, but Jewish and she needed help. I did whatever I could. We didn't ever talk about it. It was very dangerous, It was something you had to but I knew that if I decided do, and it was easy to do to help I had to do it because it was your duty. without fear.” And that was the beginning because when her husband Agnieska Budna-Widerschal, a came, that was all right too. religious Catholic from the north And when the sister came, of Poland, defied the Nazi well, why not?” orders threatening to shoot any Pole or Ukrainian caught trying Bert Bochove of The Netherlands, to hide Jews. who hid 37 Jews.
“What I did “What I did for the Jewish came naturally. people...was but an It would have been unnatural infinitesimal contribution to not to do it.” what ought to have been done Over 20,000 gentiles have been designated in order to prevent this Herta Muller-Kuhlenthal, Righteous Amongst the Nations by horrible slaughter...” Netherlands. Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial Authority Father Marie-Benoit, France. in Israel, for their role in sheltering and protecting Jews during the Holocaust.
Quakers
The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) are well known for their philosophy of helping their fellow-man. During the 1920s, 30s and
40s, they worked tirelessly to help those fleeing Nazi Europe. Between 1928 and 1939 the Quaker International Centre in Vienna handled over 11,000 applications for exit papers and re-settlement, affecting 15,000 people. The Centre managed to help more than 4,500 people settle in other countries and assisted 2,408 Jews to leave Austria. Several refugees were facilitated by Friends in Ireland who sheltered them in their private houses. Some of these refugees settled here and made Ireland their new home.
page 25 Holocaust MEMORIAL DAY
An improbable train journey Herbert Remmel – the German child with During the war, the Nazis made efforts to repatriate a Mayo accent German nationals held by the Western Allies, by exchanging them for Jews. In 1943, the Nazis established Ireland’s reluctance to accept Jewish refugees both before Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on the site of what and after the War, contrasted sharply with the warm had been a camp for wounded French, Belgian and welcome for German children under Operation Shamrock Russian prisoners of war. In a special section put aside in 1946. In Cologne, the local selection committee gave for the exchange programme, 4,000 Jewish inmates priority to children of anti-Nazi victims of persecution. awaiting exchange were relatively well treated. Herbert Remmel’s family were staunch opponents of the Nazis. His father, Christian, was a member of the Communist Party. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Christian and his comrades helped individuals on the run escape Germany across the well guarded ‘green’ border into neutral Holland or Belgium.
Although Christian’s activities were originally for the benefit of political opponents of Nazism, he and his friends also helped several Jews to escape. During the war, Christian gave refuge to a half-Jewish woman for several months who would otherwise have been reported to the Gestapo.
Christian Remmel continued to work with the Cologne In the event, few Jews were actually exchanged. But resistance movement, the Klettenberg Group, until someone following complex negotiations involving German and betrayed him to the Gestapo. He was arrested in British officials, the Jewish Agency, and the International November 1944 and sentenced to death. He was sent to Red Cross, one train carrying 222 Dutch Jews did leave Butzbach prison, but liberated by a US tank squadron just Bergen-Belsen on 29 June, 1944. When the train arrived in 24 hours before he was due to be executed. Istanbul in neutral Turkey, the Dutch Jews were exchanged for a group of German Templars who had been interned After the war, Christian’s son, Herbert, lived with an Irish as enemy aliens by the British Mandatory authorities foster family in Inchicore in Dublin for three years. He in Palestine. shared his time with them in the city and with their relations on a farm in Co. Mayo where he went to school The Jews, who had been issued with entry visas by the and learned Irish. British, continued their journey to Palestine by train.
They reached Rosh Hanikra on the border with Lebanon The horror of the Holocaust is not that it deviated just 11 days after being plucked from almost certain from human norms; the horror is that it didn’t. What death in the heart of the Nazi genocide machine. Some of happened may happen again, to others not the Dutch Jews who reached the safety of the Jewish necessarily Jews, perpetrated by others, not homeland are still alive in Israel today. necessarily Germans. We are all possible victims, possible perpetrators, possible bystanders. Yehuda Bauer, 2001
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The Legacy of the Holocaust From an address by Simone Veil, President of the Foundation for Holocaust Remembrance
It was the survivors themselves who first acknowledged their responsibility for passing on knowledge of the Holocaust and keeping its memory alive. The Holocaust was intended not to have any witnesses or history. The Nazi plan was to erase an entire people from the history and memory of the world. Everything was planned, thought out and organised so as not to leave any trace. We were not supposed to survive. The Nazi death machine was designed to eradicate not only the Jews and Gypsies as peoples, but also all evidence of their extermination. The existence of the gas chambers was kept hidden like a state secret.
The Shoah reflects the image of absolute deprivation, of a process of dehumanisation carried through to the end, and as such it inspires an endless debate on the human conscience and human dignity. For this reason, I consider it essential to teach about the Shoah, whether there are Jews in your respective countries or not - whether there are many, or few, or none left.
The crux of the matter is the facts themselves, the concrete, unvarnished, straightforward facts, the will to humiliate and degrade, the organisation, the planning and the methods used to kill. But the facts in themselves would have little meaning if no attention was paid to the racist ideology that led to the genocide, the support it received from many different quarters, and its sources and spokespeople. There are so many avenues to explore before we understand how, in the 20th century, a nation of philosophers, musicians and poets was able not only to devise the "final solution", but also to carry it out so efficiently!
The Shoah should never be scoffed at, watered down, buried, used for other ends and, in short, trivialised.
The Shoah is a legacy that belongs to us all. I ardently hope that the memory of the Shoah will not be used to give us a clear conscience, but that it will permanently serve to foster respect for human dignity and the fundamental values that underpin our civilisation.
Can of Zyklon B. A commercial pesticide, Zyklon B was originally used to kill vermin. The Nazis first used it to kill human beings in August 1941 when Soviet prisoners of war were murdered in an improvised gas chamber at Auschwitz I. Seven kilogrammes of the pellets produced enough hydrogen cyanide gas to kill 1,500 people
page 27 Holocaust MEMORIAL DAY
HONOURED GUESTS Mr Terry Samuels – Bergen-Belsen Mrs Suzi Diamond – Bergen-Belsen Mr Tomi Reichental – Bergen-Belsen Mr Geoffrey Phillips – Kindertransport Mrs Doris Segal – Sudetenland Mr Zoltan Zinn-Collis – Bergen-Belsen Mrs Rosel Siev – Aurich, Germany
BIBLIOGRAPHY After Such Knowledge: Memory, History and the Legacy of the Holocaust, by Eva Hoffman, Public Affairs, 2004 Never Again, by Martin Gilbert, Harper Collins, 2001 Re-Presenting the Shoah for the 21st Century, edited by Ronit Lentin, Berghahn Books, 2004 Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, edited by Robert Rosett and Shmuel Spector, in association with Yad Vashem the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, The Jerusalem Publishing House Ltd., 2000 …I never saw another butterfly…Children’s Drawings and Poems from Terezin Concentration Camp, 1942-1944, Schocken Books Inc., 1993 Tell Them We Remember: The Story of the Holocaust, by Susan D Bachrach, Little, Brown and Company, 1994 The World Must Know, by Michael Berenbaum, Little, Brown and Company, 1993 I Cannot Forgive, by Rudolf Vrba and Alan Bestic, Bantam Books, 1964 A Snail in My Prime: New and Selected Poems, by Paul Durcan, Harvill, 1993
PHOTOGRAPHS AND ILLUSTRATIONS Original Art by Tisa Van der Schulenburg Gate-tower and Ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau: courtesy Panstwowe Muzeum, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Poland Map of Europe: reproduced in Never Again Hat factory photographs: reproduced in the Connaught Telegraph, 1997, Ernie Sweeney, private collection Hirsch Ribbons photographs: Jenny Hirsch, private collection Gypsy children: State Museum, Auschwitz, Poland, reproduced in The World Must Know Arrival of Gypsy prisoners at Auschwitz: USHMM photo credit, Lydia Chagoll Disabled girl before her murder: Ernst Klee, Frankfurt, Germany, reproduced in The World Must Know Mulatto child: reproduced in Tell Them We Remember Images of black victims: courtesy USHMM Library of Congress Political opponents being arrested: reproduced in Tell them We Remember Badges of Hate: reproduced from poster produced by USHMM The Struma: photographs reproduced courtesy of Yad Vashem photo archives Park Bench – nicht für juden: Hulton Archive, reproduced in The Irish Times, 19 April 2003 Riegner Cable: reproduced in Encyclopedia of the Holocaust Illustration of Crematorium ll with chimney: by Alfred Kantor, reproduced in Never Again Tomi Reichental’s grandmother, Rosaleen: private collection Pile of corpses: USHMM courtesy of William A. Scott lll Monument to Janusz Korczak: Yad Vashem, The Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, Jerusalem, Israel Rudolf Vrba: reproduced in I Cannot Forgive Vrba’s escape route: reproduced in Never Again Gas chamber at Majdanek: photo USHMM reproduced in Tell Them We Remember Crematoria lll in Birkenau (Auschwitz ll): reproduced in Encyclopedia of the Holocaust Photographs of Righteous Among the Nations: Wallenberg by Thomas Veres reproduced in Never Again, Grueninger reproduced in Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Sempo, Mendes and Ulkumen: courtesy of Yad Vashem photo archives Liberation photographs: Bergen Belsen shortly after Liberation: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust; Red Army soldiers in Auschwitz; US soldiers in Buchenwald: Russian tanks in Thereseinstadt; Survivors in Auschwitz: courtesy of Yad Vashem photo archives Zyklon B gas pellets: reproduced in Tell Them We Remember on loan from the State Museum, Auschwitz, State Museum of Majdanek, Lublin, Poland; kz-gedenkstätte Sachsenhausen, Germany, photo: USHMM
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The committee wishes to acknowledge the co-operation of: The Participants The Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform The Lord Mayor of Dublin, Cllr Michael Conaghan Dublin City Council City Hall Yad Vashem, The Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, Jerusalem, Israel The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington DC This project was made possible through the generosity of: The Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform The Dublin Maccabi Charitable Trust The Jewish Representative Council of Ireland The Sisters of Sion The Council for Christians and Jews MASTER of CEREMONIES: Yanky Fachler Musical Director: Mark Duley Soloist: Rachel Talbot Cello: Aisling Drury Byrne
HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY COMMITTEE Oliver Donohoe Lynn Jackson Yanky Fachler Garrett Byrne Marilyn Taylor Sister Carmel Niland Estelle Menton Debbie Briscoe
BROCHURE Editors: Lynn Jackson, Yanky Fachler Printing: Print Bureau, The Triangle, Ranelagh, Dublin 6 Design: Siobhán O Reilly, Print Bureau
page 28 Further information Telephone: +353 1 6690593 Email: [email protected] Holocaust MEMORIAL DAY
Our generation, and the generation or two after us, will be the last that will be able to say that we stood and shook hands of some of those who survived.
Go home from this place and tell your children and your grandchildren and your great-grandchildren that today in Listowel, you looked into eyes that witnessed the most cataclysmic events ever unleashed by mankind upon mankind. Tell them that you met people who will still be remembered and still talked about and still wept over 10,000 years from now – because if they are not, there will be no hope for us at all. The Holocaust happened and it can happen again, and every one of us, if only out of our own sense of self-preservation, has a solemn duty to ensure that nothing like it ever occurs again.
Paddy Fitzgibbon at the unveiling of the Holocaust memorial in Listowel, Co. Kerry, 1995 Dublin January 2005